Chapter XXX - Concerning Prescience and Predestination

We ought to
understand that while God knows all things beforehand, yet He does not
predetermine all things. For He knows beforehand those things that are in
our power, but He does not predetermine them. For it is not His will that
there should be wickedness nor does He choose to compel virtue. So that
predetermination is the work of the divine command based on
fore-knowledge. But on the other hand God predetermines those things which
are not within our power in accordance with His prescience. For already
God in His prescience has prejudged all things in accordance with His
goodness and justice.

Bear in mind,
too, that virtue is a gift from God implanted in our nature, and that He
Himself is the source and cause of all good, 43band without His
co-operation and help we cannot will or do any good thing. But we have it
in our power either to abide in virtue and follow God, Who calls us into
ways of virtue, or to stray from paths of virtue, which is to dwell in
wickedness, and to follow the devil who summons but cannot compel us. For
wickedness is nothing else than the withdrawal of goodness, just as
darkness is nothing else than the withdrawal of light. While then we abide
in the natural state we abide in virtue, but when we deviate from the
natural state, that is from virtue, we come into an unnatural state and
dwell in wickedness.

Repentance is
the returning from the unnatural into the natural state, from the devil to
God, through discipline and effort.

Man then the
Creator made male, giving him to share in His own divine grace, and
bringing him thus into communion with Himself: and thus it was that he
gave in the manner of a prophet the names to living things, with authority
as though they were given to be his slaves. For having been endowed with
reason and mind, and free-will after the image of God, he was fitly
entrusted with dominion over earthly things by the common Creator and
Master of all.

But since God in
His prescience knew that man would transgress and become liable to
destruction, He made from him a female to be a help to him like himself; a
help, indeed, for the conservation of the race after the transgression
from age to age by generation. For the earliest formation is called
‘making’ and not ‘generation.’ For ‘making’ is the original
formation at God’s hands, while ‘generation’ is the succession from
each other made necessary by the sentence of death imposed on us on
account of the transgression.

This man He
placed in Paradise, a home that was alike spiritual and sensible. For he
lived in the body on the earth in the realm of sense, while he dwelt in
the spirit among the angels, cultivating divine thoughts, and being
supported by them: living in naked simplicity a life free from
artificiality, and being led up through His creations to the one and only
Creator, in Whose contemplation he found joy and gladness.

When therefore
He had furnished his nature with free-will, He imposed a law on him, not
to taste of the tree of knowledge. Concerning this tree, we have said as
much as is necessary in the chapter about Paradise, at least as much as it
was in our power to say. And with this command He gave the promise that,
if he should preserve the dignity of the soul by giving the victory to
reason, and acknowledging his Creator and observing His command, he should
share eternal blessedness and live to all eternity, proving mightier than
death: but if forsooth he should subject the soul to the body, and prefer
the delights of the body, comparing himself in ignorance of his true
dignity to the senseless beasts, and shaking off His Creator’s yoke, and
neglecting His divine injunction, he will be liable to death and
corruption, and will be compelled to labour throughout a miserable life.
For it was no profit to man to obtain incorruption while still untried and
unproved, lest he should fall into pride and under the judgment of the
devil. For through his incorruption the devil, when he had fallen as the
result of his own free choice, was firmly established in wickedness, so
that there was no room for repentance and no hope of change: just as,
moreover, the angels also, when they had made free choice of virtue became
through grace immoveably rooted in goodness.

It was
necessary, therefore, that man should first be put to the test (for man
untried and unproved would be worth nothing), and being made perfect by
the trial through the observance of the command should thus receive
incorruption as the prize of his virtue. For being intermediate between
God and matter he was destined, if he kept the command, to be delivered
from his natural relation to existing things and to be made one with
God’s estate, and to be immoveably established in goodness, but, if he
transgressed and inclined the rather to what was material, and tore his
mind from the Author of his being, I mean God, his fate was to be
corruption, and he was to become subject to passion instead of
passionless, and mortal instead of immortal, and dependent on connection
and unsettled generation. And in his desire for life he would cling to
pleasures as though they were necessary to maintain it, and would
fearlessly abhor those who sought to deprive him of these, and transfer
his desire from God to matter, and his anger from the real enemy of his
salvation to his own brethren. The 44benvy of the devil then was the
reason of man’s fall. For that same demon, so full of envy and with such
a hatred of good, would not suffer us to enjoy the pleasures of heaven,
when he himself was kept below on account of his arrogance, and hence the
false one tempts miserable man with the hope of Godhead, and leading him
up to as great a height of arrogance as himself, he hurls him down into a
pit of destruction just as deep.